Authors: David Farland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Spirit Walker (25 page)
At the foot of the stairs, Wisteria lay asleep on the wagon. Tull could see her as clearly as if she were at arm’s length. Her soul was pink and black—love and darkness—like the inside of a shell, and he wanted to touch that soul, heal it, put his arms around her and cover the darkness.
Tull hurtled down toward his dying body like a hermit crab lunging toward an empty shell.
For a moment, he felt disconnected, and his heart thumped in his chest. He struggled to swallow, felt his breakfast sitting sluggishly in his belly, and he tried to move a finger.
There were so many connections to make, so many muscles to move. To breathe was a major chore, and his chest felt as if it were wrapped in bands of iron. Opening his eyes took as much effort as if he were opening a cavernous door.
Phylomon bent over him, frowning, then jerked back in surprise as Tull’s eyes snapped open.
Ayuvah grabbed Tull’s face, turned it toward him, and shouted in surprise: “You are a Spirit Walker!”
And then, with breath-stealing suddenness, Tull grasped the full import of Ayuvah's words, and the weight of destiny fell hard upon him.
This is why Chaa sent me on this journey,
Tull realized.
About Spirit Walker
When I finished my first novel,
On My Way to Paradise
, my publisher asked me to extend it by a few thousand words. I felt that the novel was just the right length, so I asked my editor, “What more would you want me to say?”
She answered, “Lou Aronica, the president of the company wants you to write an essay. He wants to know how in the hell you were able to write such a book.”
The novel went on to become a bestseller in the science fiction genre and win a major award, which kept my publishers happy.
But afterward, my editor asked, “What would you like to write next?”
I told her, “I’d like to write a big fantasy, something akin to Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings.
”
She said gravely, “Dave, you’re a bestselling science fiction writer. Most people take twenty years to get where you got on your first novel. We don’t ever want to see a fantasy novel from you.”
So I had to reconsider. I love science fiction, but I felt that my heart really wanted to move in the direction of fantasy. Thus, I began thinking about how to mingle the two.
The further one moves into the future, I reasoned, the more wondrous and unknowable the world becomes. In essence, it moves more toward fantasy. Is it possible to create a story where science and fantasy seem to become blurred?
In 1989, I had gone to a convention and listened to a talk by a paleobiologist who had recently taken some genetic material from the samples of a supersaurus. It seemed to me that a lifelong dream was on its way to being filled.
You see, as a child, I often wondered what I would become when I grew up. I remember one time when an old woman asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I was only eight, and I didn’t exactly know how to describe the answer. I knew that dinosaurs had lived a long time ago, and that all life was formed from genes and chromosomes. I knew that I’d have to figure out how to put those genes together, so I answered, “I want to be a genetic.…paleo.…engineer.”
She stepped back in surprise, perhaps because I hadn’t said that I wanted to be a policeman or a fireman, and said, “What a smart little boy you are. Whatever do … these people do?”
“We build dinosaurs,” I said with great satisfaction. “I mean, not now, not yet, of course. But someday we'll build dinosaurs.…”
When I went to college in 1978, I tried to figure out how to get on that career path, but the colleges in my area didn’t even offer courses in genetic engineering yet. So I majored in pre-medical microbiology, and decided that I would just have to figure it out myself.
Eventually, though, my urge to write took over.
So for my second novel, I decided to create some dinosaurs.
My first thought actually was to write a novel about a family trapped on a small island, where genetically engineered dinosaurs were being created. But then I thought, “No that’s too easy, too
Island of Doctor Moreau
.”
I abandoned that idea and decided to create an entire world, a terrestrial zoo in the far future.
Coincidentally, Michael Crichton’s novel
Jurassic Park
came out the same month that the first book in this series did.
But writing an adventure that was set in the far future wasn’t enough for me. That was too simple. I wanted to tackle some complex themes. I suppose that like Huron in my tale, the artist in me feels as if I must try to speak the ineffable.
As a child, I never felt connected to others. My father was abusive at times. He was Jenks. So I wrote about him.
I often felt that I rejected my father as a child, so I went flailing about searching for a new father—much as Tull seeks for a father figure with Chaa and Phylomon and others.
So I wrote about that.
More importantly, I wanted to write about the emotional component of memory. At the time, I suspected that memories only develop and acquire significance when they are accompanied by powerful emotions. Thus, in order to learn something, we need to feel an emotion while learning a lesson—fear, or love, or wonder. (There is a component of fear to both love and wonder.)
In fact, I suspected that things like post-traumatic stress disorder occur when emotions are so overwhelming that lessons can’t be unlearned.
For children who suffer abuse, “unlearning” hate, and anger, and fear becomes a major obstacle. We must struggle to change. It’s as if we're sculpted of hardening clay, and we must struggle to remake ourselves, before we become forever hardened.
Since I wrote this novel, a number of studies have confirmed my suspicions.
So at the time I was looking at powerful emotions—love, and lust, and fear—and wondering how they combined in order to create a bond between people. Not just a bond between men and women, but between parents and children, between brothers and sisters.
In other words, how do our emotions affect the creation of societies? Do negative emotions create bonds powerful enough to perpetuate undesirable social ties?
Can we break the old bonds and form better ones? In other words, despite our powerful emotional chains, can we figure out ways to build a better world?
This story, for me, became a meditation.
The answer to my questions, I think, lies at the end of the series.
Glossary
Anee—
A mineral-poor moon 11,000 miles in diameter that circles a gas giant named
Thor
near a type I star 1950 lightyears from Earth. In the year 2681, the Alliance of Nations began terraforming Anee in order to create a terrestrial zoo—a place where genetic paleontologists could store specimens of animals recreated from the Jurassic, Miocene, and Pliocene Eras. Each of three continents stores representatives from one of the Eras.
Creators
—A race of highly intelligent beings, part machine and part biological organism, designed by genetic paleontologists to maintain the ecosystems of Anee. The Creators are living DNA synthesizers. To control animal populations, they frequently design and give birth to predators and parasites. The Creators are strictly programmed to perform their specific jobs. After the death of the Creator named Forester 1, the Creators designed
Dryads
to protect the forests.
Dire Wolves
—
Canis Dirus
—A heavy-bodied dark gray wolf common during the Pleistocene, short on cunning but long on tenacity and viciousness.
Dragons
—Warm-blooded flying carnivores that were created by the Starfarers to be an eco-barrier. Each continent has several varieties of dragon in various sizes—from the giant great-horned dragons to the tiny hawk dragon. Each dragon is born with a genetically transmitted memory that encourages it to destroy species that it recognizes as foreign to the environment.
Dryads
—A being made by the Creators to maintain forests in Pliocene areas after the Creator Forester 1 was killed in an earthquake. Dryads are humanoid females with long life spans and strange abilities. The abilities, size, and coloration of the Dryad depends upon the type of forest it was created to maintain.
Eco-barriers
—Certain animals have the ability to migrate across oceans. For example, many types of semi-aquatic carnivorous dinosaur could easily make such journeys, and the introduction of such animals into an area populated by Pleistocene sabertooths could be disastrous, since the sabertooths could not compete with the larger predators. The paleontologists who terraformed Anee recognized the danger such transoceanic migrations could cause. Therefore, they erected a series of “eco-barriers” to prevent migrations. These barriers consist of artificially engineered predators: primarily, the deep-ocean “sea serpent” to patrol the waterways; and various species of “dragon” to patrol the sky. Both the sea serpent and the dragon are ruthless predators without equal in nature.
Eridani
—An alien race that went to war with humans in the year 2902. Using small faster-than-light drone warships, the Eridani successfully stopped all extraplanetary travel between human settlements within a matter of four years.
Hukm
—
Homo-gigantis
. A race of large apelike humanoids with long brownish-red or white fur. The Hukm, one of several races of giant hominids once native to Earth, were originally restricted to a small region of Northeast Asia, and the species thrived only for a few thousand years. Fossil evidence indicates that the race probably died out about 396,000 BC. Extinction appeared to occur due to climactic changes between glacial periods, and may have come about as a result of inter-species warfare accompanied by starvation. When reintroduced into the wild on Anee, the Hukm showed themselves to be highly social vegetarians who quickly domesticated the woolly mammoths.
Kwea
—Emotional resonance. Often passionate feelings aroused by memories. Neanderthals have specific words that can refer to hundreds of different kinds of kwea, based upon the types and degrees of emotionality, but these are ignored in translation for simplicity’s sake.
For a Neanderthal, every object, every experience, every memory carries an emotional weight, a value of kwea. While some things, like the tale of Adjonai, are so universally known that nearly all Neanderthals feel a similar type of fear of him, in most cases the weight of kwea is based upon personal experience.
For example, a common knife may be considered sacred or of great value to one individual because of his associated kwea, while for another the same object would seem plain and unimportant.
Mastodon
—On Anee, any of eleven species of pachyderm that inhabit woodlands and grasslands in every climatic region.
Mastodon Men
—
Homo rex
. A race of carnivorous humanoids of low intelligence, averaging some 8.5 feet in height and weighing 500-800 pounds. Mastodon Man originally inhabited mountainous areas in Asia from 250,000-75,000 BC. On Earth, the Mastodon Man apparently did not compete well with smaller humanoids, but on the fecund world of Anee they quickly gained a strong foothold.
Neanderthal
—
Homo neanderthalensis
(see also
Pwi
,
Okanjara,
and
Thrall
). The Neanderthals are a distinct species, similar to modern humans in size and build, but differing from humans in their DNA by .285%. Neanderthals tend to be larger and stronger than humans, and have slightly shorter arms and a muscular build. The Neanderthal spine has less curvature, so Neanderthals stand straighter than humans do, and their large toe is curved inward, allowing them to run faster. The Neanderthal’s chest cavity is larger than that of a human, and their arms rotate at a greater angle. Their skulls are thicker, hips slightly wider.
Neanderthals have sandy yellow to red hair and green, blue, or yellow-brown eyes. They have heavy supraorbital ridges that give their eyes a deep-set appearance. Their teeth and palate tend to protrude more than that of a human, yet they completely lack a chin.
The hands of a Neanderthal differ in structure from that of a human. The hands of a Neanderthal are larger and stronger than those of a human, with large robust knuckles. The human thumb is tilted at a forty-five degree angle to the fingers so that tip of the thumb can touch the tip of each individual finger; however, a Neanderthal’s thumb is not tilted at an angle to the fingers, and the Neanderthal is therefore far less dexterous than a human.
Differences in the Neanderthal palate, larynx, and sinus cavities do not allow them to vocalize most long vowels or semivowels used by humans. Instead, the Neanderthals shorten long vowels and tend to speak through their noses.
The cerebral cortex of the Neanderthal brain is slightly larger than that of a modern human, and they are fully the intellectual equals of humans. However, the Neanderthal hypothalamus, the area of the brain responsible for processing emotions, is three times as large as that of a human. For this reason, Neanderthals tend to lead a very complex emotional life. Because of the way that the Neanderthal brain processes information, memories frequently carry very strong, emotionally-charged ties.
Because Neanderthals feel their emotions more powerfully than humans do, they feel a consuming need to express these emotions. Neanderthal dialects vary by region, but their languages have some similarities. Any noun or verb can be modified by various suffixes to express the Neanderthal’s feelings about an object or action. The order of the suffixes always goes:
noun or verb + emotional indicator + person + emotional degree indicator.
For example instead of saying “the sky is gray,” the Neanderthal might express his feelings about the subject:
szerzhoaFava ah femma
. This sentence literally reads “Sky-love-I-generously is gray,” and would be translated “The gray sky which I love completely.” The first word in the sentence,
szerzhoaFava
, is translated below:
Emotional
Noun Base + Indicator + Person + Degree Indicator
szer (sky) zho (love) a (I) Fava (completely)
The degree indicator is often a noun itself. For example, the word
Fava
means “pear tree.” On Anee, several varieties of wild pear bear fruit in late autumn. Neanderthal legends often embellish this, telling of heroes starving in the wilderness who are saved by pear trees that magically blossom and ripen in mid-winter when the tree “sees” the hero coming. Because of this reputation for generosity,
Fava
then becomes synonymous with
generous
. When used as an emotional indicator,
Fava
means “given with all the heart.”
Okanjara
—The Free Ones. (Literally, “I am free!”) Any Neanderthal who has escaped slavery after a long period of time is an Okanjara.
Phylomon
—The last living human who was not born on Anee. The last of the Starfarers. A man who, because he still benefits from the technology of the Starfarers, has survived for over one thousand years.
Pirate Lords
—When an interstellar war between mankind and the Eridani first stranded the genetic paleontologists on Anee, a political argument soon developed over how mankind should treat their creations—specifically the Neanderthals. Certain technicians believed that by conscripting Neanderthals for use as laborers, humans could be left free to build the plasma missiles they hoped could destroy the Eridani warships circling Anee. Others correctly believed the effort would be wasted. Those who favored enslaving the Neanderthal formed an independent colony upon the island of Bashevgo. After two centuries of building, the Lords finally attacked the Eridani drones. The Slave Lords and their colony were nearly decimated in a counterattack, yet the offspring of the Slave Lords of Bashevgo still survive both upon Bashevgo and in the nation of Craal, and the Slave Lords prey upon both the Neanderthal and their human cousins.
Pwi
—Neanderthals who have never been enslaved by the Pirate Lords call themselves
Pwi,
the family. By the time that the first humans were forced to move to Anee, the original colony of Neanderthals had covered most of the Eastern half of the continent they called “Homeland,” and Neanderthals numbered about two million. Pwi dialects and customs were diverging, and they were on the verge of splintering into several large tribes. But as the Neanderthals found themselves battling a common enemy, they regained a sense of common identity and called themselves only “family.”
Red drones
—Orbital warships piloted by artificial intelligences sent by the Eridani to patrol the skies above Anee. Their neutron cannons destroy any mechanical vessel or organic being that climbs over four kilometers into the air. Originally, four warship were stationed over Anee, but two were destroyed by the Pirate Lords.
Sabertooth lion
—
Smilodon fatalis
—a large tawny lion with very long, serrated canines. The sabertooth lions live in prides in grassy and low, wet areas. Because of poor eyesight and teeth that are not adapted for small prey, the sabertooth primarily hunts large herd animals. Some of its favorite victims are the bison, giant sloth, the giant beaver (a semiaquatic water rat weighing up to 500 pounds), the mastodon, the hippo-like toxodonts, and the giant capybara. On Earth, the sabertooth was such a successful predator, that when it overpopulated in 8000 BC, over-predation coupled with climatic instability caused the extinction of over a hundred other species. With its food base destroyed, the sabertooth soon became extinct.
Scimitar cat
—
homotherium
. A solitary but powerful lion with yellow and brown stripes. Because of its elongated front legs, it runs with a bouncing gait, much like a jackal. The scimitar cat inhabits mountainous areas and hunts large prey by pouncing from a tree or rock. A female scimitar cat will often kill a young mastodon weighing 600 pounds and then drag it two miles so she can feed her cubs.
Sea serpents
—Giant eel-like carnivores created by the Starfarers to keep animals from migrating across the ocean from one continent to another. Sea serpents can vary their color to conform to background, can grow to a length of 380 feet, and can attack prey in two ways: by swallowing the prey whole, or by strangulation. Thorn-like protrusions on the serpent’s armored scales tend to slice prey open when the serpent attacks by strangulation.
Young serpents are less than a meter in length when they hatch in the spring. They feed on fish for the first several months, and in their feeding frenzy drive great schools of fish up the rivers. Within six weeks the serpents grow to a length of sixteen feet and head for open waters and larger prey. At the end of their first year, serpents often measure over a hundred feet in length.
Slave Lords
—Humans who enslave Neanderthals and other humans. Shortly after the red drones forced the human Starfarers into exile on Anee, some of the paleontologists began enslaving Neanderthals for use as miners, field hands, and domestic servants. The human Starfarers believed that if they could concentrate on developing weaponry to fight the red drones, they could escape Anee within a few centuries. But when their efforts failed, most of the Starfarers were killed, and much of their technology died with them. The few degenerate descendants of these Starfarers set up the nation of Craal, based upon a slave economy, and became known as the Slave Lords.
Starfarers
—The genetic paleontologists and their crew who first began the work of terraforming Anee. By 2816, mankind had been engaged in genetically and mechanically upgrading himself for so long, that the Starfarers were, in a sense, no longer human. The Starfarers had hairless bodies of various colors, depending upon the shade of the symbiote they chose for their skin; had total recall of all they saw and heard; with mechanical aid could achieve virtual immortality; and the Starfarers had a genetically transmitted “dictionary” that gave all members of their race a knowledge of English and mathematics. When the Eridani destroyed the Starfarer’s space station above Anee, the Starfarers lost the technology that would allow them to pass their extended life-span on to their descendants, but some of their genetic upgrades remained.
Tantos
—A powerful Slave Lord who rules the island of Bashevgo.
Terrazin Dragontamer
—A Neanderthal psychic who used his powers to overthrow the island of Bashevgo.